THE SEMANTIC STRUCTURE OF THE WORD

1. Word Meaning. General Notion

2. Types of Word Meaning

3. Components of Lexical Meaning

4. The Semantic Structure of the word

5. Word Meaning and Motivation

6. Change of Meaning

7. Nature of Semantic Change

8. Results of Semantic Change

6.1. Word meaning. General notion. The branch of linguistics which specializes in the study of word meaning is called semantics. Meaning can be described as a component of the word through which a concept is communicated, thus endowing the word with the ability of denoting real objects, qualities, actions and abstract notions.

There are three main approaches to the definition of meaning:

- referential or analytical approach;

- functional or contextual approach;

- operational or information-oriented approach.

The essential characteristic of the Referential Approach is that it distinguishes between the three components closely connected with meaning: 1) the sound-form of the linguistic sign; 2) the concept underlying the linguistic sign; 3) the referent, i.e. the object or fact of objective reality or our experience to which the linguistic sign refers.

The referential model of meaning is the so-called ‘basic triangle’ by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards:

concept

sound-form referent

(symbol)

The sound-form or symbol is a linguistic element – a lexical item, a word as a combination of sounds and morphemes, a word-combination, a sentence, an utterance etc. The referent is an object of our experience, a fact of the outer world which is encompassed by a given symbol. The concept or the thought of reference is the permanent bond or association in our mind that mirrors the referent as a generalized entity, or in other words, provides for our understanding of it. According to this theory, the relationship between names and things is viewed not as a direct link, but as a link via concepts of our mind which inevitably involves variation in people’s perceptions and attitudes.

The diagram implies that meaning is in a way a correlation between the sound-form of a word, the underlying concept and the concrete object it denotes. There is no direct connection between the sound-form and the meaning of the word. The connection is arbitrary and conventional. This can easily be checked if we compare the sound-forms of different languages which convey one and the same meaning: English [pen] and Russian [ручка]. These words have different sound-forms but express the same meaning.

Concepts are categories of human cognition, they are thoughts of objects that single out their essential features, and thus concepts are the results of abstraction and generalization. In this respect they are almost the same for the whole of humanity in one and the same period of its historical development. The meanings of words, however, are different in different languages, cf. English – ‘a building for human habituation’ – house, ‘fixed residence of family or household’ – home; Russian – both concepts have the same sound-form, or word – дом. So concepts expressed by one and the same word in one language can be expressed by several words in another.

Meaning must be distinguished from referent, as meaning belongs to linguistic categories while the denoted object or referent is beyond the scope of language. One and the same object may be denoted by more than one word of a different meaning, e.g. the same boy can be denoted by such words as ‘son, brother, Peter, friend, human being etc’.

The conclusion is that meaning cannot be identified with any of the three points of the basic triangle – the sound form, the concept and the referent, but is closely connected with them.

The referential definitions of meaning are usually criticized on the ground that: 1) they cannot be applied to sentences; 2) they cannot account for certain semantic additions emerging in the process of communication; 3) they fail to account for the fact that one word may denote different objects and phenomena (polysemy) while one and the same object may be denoted by different words (synonymy).

Functional, or Contextual Approach to Meaning. The functional approach to meaning maintains that the meaning of a linguistic unit can be studied only through its relation to other linguistic units. According to it the meanings of the words ‘to entertain’ and ‘entertainment’ are different because they function in speech differently, i.e. occupy different positions in relation to other words. ‘To entertain’ can be followed by a noun (to entertain children) and preceded by a noun or a pronoun (we entertained). ‘Entertainment’ may be followed by a preposition (entertainment for the children) and the particle ‘to’ + infinitive (it was pure entertainment to watch them dance), it may be preceded by a verb (to provide entertainment). The position of a word to other words is called distribution of the word. As the distribution of the words ‘to entertain’ and ‘entertainment’ is different they belong to different classes of words and their meanings are different.

The same is true of different meanings of one and the same word. Analyzing the function of a word in linguistic contexts and comparing these contexts, we conclude that meanings are different, e.g. examining the linguistic contexts of the verb ‘to take’, we can see the difference of its meanings – ‘to take a seat’ (to sit down) and ‘to take to somebody’ (to begin to like someone). The term ‘context’ is defined as the minimum stretch of speech necessary and sufficient to determine which of the possible meanings of a polysemantic word is used.

The functional approach is sometimes described as contextual as it is based on the analysis of different contexts, semantic investigation here is confined to the analysis of the difference or sameness of meaning, as meaning is understood as the function of a linguistic unit.

Operational or Information-Oriented Approach to Meaning is centered on defining meaning through its role in the process of communication. It studies words in action and is interested in how meaning works and not in what meaning is. Within the framework of this approach meaning is described as information conveyed from the speaker to the listener in the process of communication. This definition is applicable to both words and sentences, so it overcomes one of the alleged drawbacks of the referential approach, though it also fails to draw a clear distinguishing line between the direct meaning and implication (additional information). For example, the sentence ‘John came at 6 o’clock’ besides the direct meaning may imply that John ‘was 2 hours late’; failed to keep his promise’; ‘came though he didn’t want to’; ‘was punctual as usual’ etc. In each case the implication will depend on the concrete situation of communication and discussing meaning as information conveyed would amount to the discussion of an infinite set of possible communication situations.

6.2. Types of Word Meaning. Word-meaning is not homogeneous; it is made up оf various components which are described as types of meaning.

Three major types of word-meaning are distinguished: grammatical, lexical and part-of-speech meaning.

The grammatical meaning is defined as an expression in speech of relationship between words. It is the component of meaning recurrent in identical sets of individual forms of different words, e.g. the tense meaning in the word-forms of the verbs ‘asked, wrote, went’; the case-meaning in the word-forms of nouns ‘boy’s, girls’, yesterday’s ‘; or the meaning of plurality in the word-forms of nouns ‘joys, parrots, days’.

The lexical meaning is the meaning proper to the given linguistic unit in all its forms and distributions. The word-forms ‘go, went, goes, going, gone’ possess different grammatical meanings of tense, person, number, but in each form they have one and the same semantic meaning denoting the process of movement.

Both lexical and grammatical meanings make up the word-meaning as neither can exist without the other.

The essence of the part-of-speech meaning of a word is revealed in the classification of lexical units into major word-classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) and minor word-classes (articles, prepositions, conjunctions etc).

All members of a major word-class share a distinguishing semantic component, which may be viewed as the lexical component of part-of-speech meaning. For example, the meaning of thingness or substantiality may be found in all the nouns – ‘doll, admiration, salt’ – though they can possess different grammatical meaning of number and case.

The grammatical aspect of part-of-speech meaning is conveyed as a rule by a set of forms. Speaking of nouns we understand that they are bound to possess a set of forms to express the grammatical meaning of number (girl - girls) and case (girl – girl’s).

The part-of-speech meaning of the words that possess only one form, i.e. prepositions, some adverbs, etc. is observed only in their distribution, e.g. ‘to come in (here, there); in (on, under) the table’.